Sometimes the best way to learn is through practical example. Reading the articles on this blog has probably given you a few ideas to help you write songs, but I think what would be more useful is to take you through the end-to-end writing process. So today’s article will be the writing of “Sparks”.

Sparks started as an instrumental idea rooted in the song Tenerife Sea by Ed Sheeran. I really liked the guitar arrangement of Tenerife Sea so at the time I thought it would be fun to learn how to play it. The song is played in EADEBE tuning, which for lack of a better term I call “Triple E” tuning. After a short session of playing the opening phrases to Tenerife Sea, I played around with my guitar while it was in the same tuning.

Tuning your guitar differently is a great way of opening up new musical possibilities. Despite the delicate, tentative nature of the guitar parts in Tenerife Sea, Triple E tuning can be quite dark. The Em chord (022000) in this tuning has to be one of the most ominous sounding chords you can play on the guitar. I played around with different ‘classic’ chord shapes and found Em7, Cadd9, Dsus4, A7sus4 quite pleasing. So I created a straight arpeggio based on those chords and then used some hammer-ons and pull-offs to make it more organic. It is this finger picking part that became the main guitar part in the verses of the song.

When I come up with a cool instrumental idea, I usually create a skeleton of a song right away so that I can flush out the musical ideas and structure more fully. Using some light drums, I created the skeleton and then overlaid the guitar parts for the verses. I needed guitar parts for the chorus and since the verses consisted of finger picking, it made sense to use strumming.

Now that I had the instrumental, I composed a topline using the piano. Composing a topline (IMHO) is relatively easy. Composing a topline that is interesting and relatively unique is hard. I wrote a lot of garbage / generic toplines but eventually I came up with one that I thought was interesting and emotive enough to keep.

Why did I compose the topline melody first? The guitar part for the verses felt very deep and dark, so I had to ensure that the melody resonated with that vibe. In this case, it made more sense to compose the melody first so that I can be certain that all the musical elements are conveying the same emotional message.

With the instrumental + topline ready to go, I put a copy on my iPhone and then temporarily shelved the project. I call this “letting it bake”. I will listen to the instrumental periodically, either on the go or at home when in the mood, just to get a deeper feel for the song, allowing it to bake into my subconscious. I find this helps generate more interesting ideas when I finally sit down to write the lyrics.

A few weeks later I decided to have a go at composing the lyrics. I played the tracks a few times and what popped into my head was a personal experience from about 10 years ago that fit the instrumental perfectly.